


salute the empire state

by roachpatrol



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alien Invasion, Child Soldiers, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-12
Updated: 2013-11-12
Packaged: 2018-01-01 06:07:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1041257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roachpatrol/pseuds/roachpatrol
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“We’ll get them,” Karkat says quietly, “We will. You and me, man, we’re a pair of badass motherfuckers. We’re going to end this war.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	salute the empire state

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [war torn eridan](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/30608) by Splickedylit. 



Karkat is up when you limp back to the day’s shelter, and your stomach rolls over to see him studying his fucking map again. He must be feeling better, though, to be up, so that’s something, isn’t it? It must be. His scabby fingers smooth a torn corner over and over, and his eyes are fever-bright. 

“I think I’ve got it, Eridan,” he says eagerly. “Look, here, sit. Feast your ganderbulbs on my magnificence, I’ve _got_ it. Those hairy taintchafes thought they could hide their munitions supply lines forever but they don’t have the sense the mother-grub invested in a run of diarrhea, it’s so obvious once you really put the pieces together—” You settle down beside him and start cracking your bag of snails while he rambles, and when he finally pauses to cough you rattle a few at him. 

“Eat,” you tell him. 

“I’m not hungry,” he says, batting your hand away. 

“Kar—”

“Don’t you _Kar_ me. I’m not! Listen, the sentries—” you pop a snail between his fangs, “—pbfth. Mfgh. Fu’f.” But he crunches a few times and swallows. “The _sentries,_ I was saying, you egregious smear of discharge—” you try to put another snail in his mouth but instead smoosh it wetly against his cheek, and he breaks off to glare at you.

“Shit. Sorry.” You wipe the slime with a sleeve, embarrassed. “Just fuckin’ eat, okay?”

He actually does, at that, quietly forcing down one snail after the other like he wants to get it done fast, like this isn’t the first protein you’ve managed to lay hands on in two nights. You curl up with your face tucked under an arm and miss your glasses badly. Vague phantom Terrors collect around the edges of your closed eyelids, chewing at you as you drift and Karkat mutters to himself and fusses with his map. They shift and mutter to each other just outside this little nest of brambles and dirt, drawing closer, blunt fingers clutching cruel guns—Karkat coughs, and you wake with an embarrassing peep. 

“I’m okay,” he says, patting your shoulder, and coughs again. “Shut up. Go back to sleep.”

“What, me? I’m not tired. You sleep,” you say, and force yourself back upright. He’s eaten the whole bag, which is, which is, okay. You had a few while you were out gathering them up.

Fuck, is it cold. Karkat’s in three standard sweaters all put together and he’s still shivering, weird little freakblood that he is, but at least he feels good to wrap around. He grumbles and squirms, but when you put your hands over his he stops fussing and starts kneading some warmth into your fingers. 

Outside there’s flecks of lacy ice pouring down from the sky, instead of rain, and they make everything look sugared until you touch it and it stings you clear to the bone: _snow_. If a cloud is cooled down far enough it crystallizes and falls as an frozen particulate. Schoolfeeds make it sound so much less shitty, but then, you suppose it’s hard to really appreciate an exoplanetary weather phenomenon when it happens to your own fucking homeworld.

“We’ll get them,” Karkat says quietly, “We will. You and me, man, we’re a pair of badass motherfuckers. We’re going to end this war.”

“Yeah,” you say, and rest your chin between his stubby horns. 

“We are.”

“Yeah, Kar. You’n me, man.”

*

When you wake up, he’s curled into your stomach and so limp it hurts to see. He’s got gross snot all down his cheek and there’s a nasty whistle to each indrawn breath and you’re scared. You sit up and touch the dry side of his face and his skin is striking, against your cold-bleached fingers, dark and mottled with color. Lowbloods are meant to be expendable, and you’ve been roughing it for longer than anyone should be expected to last. You don’t know the specs on stunted little deviants, but you suspect they’re not particularly worth a note. He’s coming apart at all seams.

“Nnnh,” he mumbles, and nuzzles into your side. His eyes slit open and stare through your stomach. “...dad?”

“Go back to sleep,” you say. 

“Nuh,” he says thickly. “Plotting. Strat’gy.”

“Do that with your eyes closed.”

“Terr’s,” he says. “For the—the Empress—” and he’s coughing again, wrecked. You hitch him closer to your chest and wait it out. Slowly, he goes under again. 

You pick up the map. Here’s the drop point. There’s the camp. Over in the rain-spotted blotchy part, that’s probably where you and Karkat are hunkered. It’s not a bad plan, really, your FLARP experience and officer’s schoolfeeding are rubbing off on him, and you can say a lot about the crazy mutant but he’s smart. And stubborn enough to give anyone a run for their money, even you. Even the Terrors. 

Karkat stops breathing for a long few moments, too many moments, before going into another wracking fit. It stings at you worse than all the stuff outside. 

You fold up the map, and stuff what few supplies you’ve got left back in your rucksacks, then sling both of them onto your back. It’s getting darker, and there’s something to be said for all this weird weather: keeps down the undead. Karkat stirs fitfully but he’s out again, he’s done. Whatever’s left in him after his latest flare of suicidal patriotism has gotten all burnt up. 

You crack your back out, gather him up in your arms, and go out into the snow.

The Terror camp is just where Karkat marked it, gleaming brightly against the silvery landscape, all boxy white tents and dainty wire fences. A sentry will be along any minute now, so you drop your rucksacks and ease Karkat down on top of them. You’ve got one chance, here, and you’re sweaty with nervous tension despite the cold. You hide your rifle on the other side of the clearing, then Karkat’s battered sickle. After that you scratch as much frozen soil up from the ground as you can with your fingers cracking from cold, and wipe it over the damning purple streak that still shows in your hair no matter how short you clip it, working the dirt in until your scalp feels wet and heavy all over. Your jaw aches from reflexively trying to flare fins that aren’t there, but at least they’ve been gone for a while, and all the twitching in the world isn’t going to re-open the seams. So: except for your eyes, you shouldn’t show royal anywhere. 

When you were young and playing pirate, back when the world was warmer and you only ever saw aliens in movies, somehow death never mattered so much. You shot, you got shot at, but you never really thought you’d die, not you, not you with your regal heritage and your bright future, and anyone who kicked it on your inevitable rise to glory was just so much trash to discard along the way. And now you’re this, sniveling around a Terror camp at twilight, covered in filth fit to make the most wretched shitblood dirt-scraper shine in comparison. 

Karkat coughs, shudders, coughs again. You take his warm hand in yours, drawing what little comfort you can, breathing in, out, in. You wish he had let you into a quadrant with him so you knew whether to pap him or kiss him or what, what flavor of sorry you should be right now. 

The sentry walks into the clearing. There’s a long, frozen moment, and then the Terror raises its rifle. 

You hold up Karkat’s cracked, scabby knuckles, and when your nails dig into his skin a bright red drop of blood trickles down the back of his hand. 

It’s silent, for a long moment, and you think you blew it, you think you screwed up, it’s going to shoot you and then Karkat and this is all for nothing—but it lowers its rifle, and comes closer. You shrink down as submissively as you can, huddled onto your knees and elbows. The thing is, that while Karkat’d have a good chance of being taken in even without his Terror-red blood, they _always_ put down highbloods: as far as you know you’re one of the last kids on the planet with any kind of rank, and a fat lot of good it’s serving you. 

The Terror takes Karkat’s hand out of yours, and Karkat coughs, startling it, but it doesn’t let go. It touches one massive, blunt finger to Karkat’s red blood, then scratches at the scab a bit, drawing more. It makes some words at you but you never learned to make a lick of sense of their barking language, you just try to look sweet and not shit yourself. It turns Karkat over and peels an eyelid back, and even with that strange blunt face you can tell it’s marveling at his eyes, the bizarre color ringing his pupils. 

You dare to point at the Terror, and then point at Karkat, then at it again. When it looks at you, you sort of knit your fingers together hopefully. You and him, you want to say. He’s one of you, right? 

He isn’t, of course, and if he wasn’t dying he’d gut you for the insinuation. But he is dying, and that changes a lot. The Terror pulls out a communication device from its belt and barks at it for a while, looking at you and Karkat, then puts it away. It grabs a knife as long as your arm from its belt and you freeze up, you go even smaller. Your spine stings with how small you curl. No, no, you brought him in, you’re cooperating, _please_ —

Then it grabs one of your horns, and all the breath leaves you in a rush. It feels like—no one’s ever touched your horns, no one touches—it’s not right, feels—alien, burning, absurd—the knife bites in deep. You scream, and just barely have the presence of mind not to claw. Instead you clench your fingers around your knees and choke back another cry as the knife digs deeper. It _saws_. You shudder wretchedly while the Terror trims your horn down to less than half a fingerlength and when it pauses and draws back you just sit there, stunned and sick. Karkat moans, coughs again, and you point tremblingly at your other horn. You’re not done, here. The Terror makes an awful gobbling noise that might be laughter, and obliges. 

Afterwards is—is strange. You look at your horns in the Terror’s hands, how small they are against those pylon fingers, and it tucks them into its belt, and all the fear inside you just clamps down and goes quiet. It’s nothing like the hot, messy bloodfever that took you when you got a fin shot off, or the nauseous uncontrollable weeping that caught you up when Karkat trimmed your other fin to match. Instead you kneel in the dirt and shiver meekly while the Terror looks Karkat over and decides his horns are too short to bother trimming, then gestures you up to your feet. You gather Karkat up again at another gesture, then follow the Terror back to camp. It moves fast, but pauses every so often for you to keep up. 

It books you into the camp. You think distantly that you could be proud of how it has to dig up the processing equipment, how the stuff hasn’t been used in a good long while. They didn’t think there was anyone left, did they? Ha. You’ll tell Karkat, maybe, when he wakes up. If. It puts your horns in a bag and then a box and then a cabinet. It trims Karkat’s nubs after all, but just a tiny bit, for the cabinet, you guess. You think you should be glad it doesn’t take more off him. He’ll be mad enough, if he doesn’t die. It takes a picture of your eyes and a drop of your blood and does the same to Karkat, who’s still out of it, who doesn’t even twitch. You are pushed out of the processing shack and out into the rows and rows of square white tents, and there you are left. Karkat is carried away, slung over one vast shoulder like a sack of snails. 

You stand in the middle of all that white until trolls come out of the tents and look at you. They all look so small, all these trolls, small and sad and stub-horned. 

None of you ever had a chance. 

*

You stare at the side of the tent until your elbow is taken, lightly, and you’re led inside one. Warmth flows over your face and you turn blindly towards the source of it, trying to hunker down. You get tugged back up to your feet and grunt plaintively—warmth, pouring out of the bright gold coils of an electric heater. It’s been ages since you’ve felt anything so warm, and your entire hide cries out for it. But you get another tug on your elbow and stand still. 

“Huh. He must have just been docked,” someone says. “Knock, knock, anyone home?” They flick your hornstub, and you flinch, growl half-heartedly. 

“Come on, guys, back off. _Play nice_ ,” and the last is said with such a guttural mock-Terror accent it has you shivering away. There’s some laughter, but mostly the kids drift off back to whatever they were up to before you came in. 

The kid still at your elbow, the talky one, takes you further into the tent, where there’s a foul smell and a metal grille and a big barrel of water. She scoops water from the barrel and bends you down and starts rinsing your muddy hair. You’d growl at her too, but the strange quiet meekness filling you up makes it feel not worth the fuss. 

“Oh,” she says, softly, and rubs a thumb backwards over your buzzed forelock. “Highblood.”

Her hands go up around your throat, and you think, dumbly, that she’s going to draw you down for a kiss. It’s the first time anyone but Karkat’s touched you softly since the war started—but instead she crushes her thumbs up under your jaw and it hurts enough to make you squeal, it blazes pain. You hiss and hit at her and try to curl, but she just flips you over, splays you out across the barrel with the icewater soaking into your spine, her bony little hands relentless as wire snares. Her blunt-trimmed horns are rounded with new growth and her scum-green eyes are wide with fear and anger. 

“This is my camp, highblood,” she snarls. “These are my people. We got a good thing going, here, and I don’t know what the fuck you did to keep the Terrans from putting you down like the psycho bastard time-bomb all you royals are, but you raise one purple hand to any of them and I will pop out your eyes and eat them on toast. _Clear?_ ”

You try to nod, but her thumbs are in the way. So you squeak, instead, a pathetic grub noise. You watched the last of your pride get put in an alien filing cabinet. She lets you go. 

“Right,” she says, breathing hard. “So long’s that’s settled. Let’s get you some lunch.”

You think maybe you just got a girlfriend. 

*

After a scrub, a change into soft white baggy clothes, and as much divinely meat-studded broth you can pack down your gullet, you start to feel yourself pulling back together. You’re warm, clean, full for the first time in ages, and now—

“Karkat,” you say, remembering, and your girl looks at you warily. 

“That your name?” she asks. 

“No, my...” you wave a hand. There isn’t space for the words you want, with so much quiet inside you. “My.”

“Mhm,” she says, and clicks her tongue scathingly. “Your. Lucky you, highblood, you’ve still got a _your_. If he’s not around here he’ll be in the—” she makes a horrid weird gargle. 

You squint at her, baffled, and she looks like she’s trying not to smile. “It’s a Terran—a Terror word, for the place they make the sick better. They take care of their wounded, you know.”

You blink. “We’re... ours,” you say, slowly, confused and kind of upset. 

She shrugs. “We’re theirs now,” she says, which is horrid to actually think about, but... Karkat. They have to take care of him since he’s theirs, and that’s okay, then, isn’t it. That’s what all this was for. You just hadn’t really thought that they’d take care of just _anyone_ , and you’re not sure how you feel about it. 

The girl drags your bowl away and licks the last few shreds of meat out of the bottom, then takes your elbow again. You follow her gratefully, tripping over your bare feet to keep close, and cautiously enjoying the proprietary prickle of claws in your sleeve as you’re towed from one fabric box to the next. She acts like if she blinks too slow she’ll open her orbs to the sight of you wearing half a dirtblood as a hat, and it’s been ages since anyone’s treated you like a legitimate threat. It’s almost as warming as the soup. 

Then a final stiff flap is folded aside and you find yourself standing in a long low place full of sickness-stink and kids laid out in rows like the world’s creepiest trophy collection, and you don’t have any proper fins anymore but the buzzing tang of dozens of lives’ biochemical discharge laps regardless at the last few receptors lining your jaw. It’s not a battlefield, though. That smell in the air—it’s not battlefield blood, not the reek of split guts or the awful mouth-watering porkstrap smell psionics make when they cook themselves from the inside. It’s just sleeping kids, and some strange chemical something that must be what the Terrors use instead of a trident to the guts or a knife to the neck. No cullditch screaming, no firefight curses, just easy steady breaths, the occasional muffled cough or sigh. It’s quiet, in here. 

It’s quiet. 

You walk through the rows of kids who aren’t dying, not anymore, and you sit down on the crisp straight edge of Karkat’s platform. He looks even smaller than you remember, and very dark against all the white fabric, and the last lingering reservations left in you die like stars at dawn, winking clean out. Beside you, the girl lets go of your sleeve, and pats your shoulder roughly. 

“The war’s over, you know,” she says. “It’s gonna be okay.” 

You nod, and she goes away. You sit and you watch Karkat as he sleeps, and after a while you take his hand. You wait for him to wake up, so you can tell him. 

*

 

_All hands up, salute the Empire State_  
 _Faith is true, she knows the way_  
 _Ten miles tall in this: an empty space_  
 _Fallen walls all around_  
 _We'll build again_  
 _Rebuild again_  
—Guster, _The Empire State_


End file.
